W3C Team blogs' Galaxy

This is an aggregation of the W3C staff's
writings, including personal blogs. The opinions expressed in these
blogs are those of the authors alone, and may not represent the
opinions of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) or any W3C
Members.

How I became an Elector

I attended the NC Democratic convention, though I didn’t have a
vote because I hadn’t figured out how to apply to be a delegate.
When they were collecting nominees for the Electors, I tried to
volunteer, but had no standing to do so… so one of the delegates
sitting near me jumped up and put my name in. I think I won a slot
because my county (Orange) is a Democratic hotbed in NC.

I was originally chosen as an Alternate Elector, but apparently
the Primary Elector declined, so I got a promotion!

Can I vote for anyone I want?

The Supreme Court ruled that there’s no federal requirement for
an Elector to vote as they’ve pledged. In principle, I could vote
for whomever I wish.

An Elector who doesn’t vote for their party’s designated
candidate is known as a “Faithless Elector”. There have been 157
faithless electors since the founding of the Electoral College. (71
of them changed their vote the candidate died in the interim…
Republican VP Sherman in 1912, and Democratic Presidential
candidate Greeley in 1872). But no Elector defection has ever
changed the result of a Presidential election.

I’m a fan of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
(NPVIC),
which is a pledge among participating states that their Electors
would vote for the winner of the national popular vote, rather than
the state popular vote. This would effectively bypass the Electoral
College if enough states someday enact it (that is, a set of states
that total 270 electoral votes). However, it failed in committee in
NC’s lower house (though the NC Sentate passed it in 2007), so that
wouldn’t apply to me.

Still, I could vote my conscience. In North Carolina, I actually
write down the name of my vote on a piece of paper, and I could
write Bernie Sanders, Vermin Supreme, Pigasus, or in a passing
moment of terrible judgment, Donald Trump. In practice, however,
there is a NC law (NC
Gen Statute §163-212) that makes it illegal for me (or other
Democratic Party Elector) to cast a vote for anyone but Hillary
Clinton and Tim Kaine; my vote would be stricken from the record,
and I’d be expelled from the Electoral College and fined $500, as
well as face censure from the Democratic Party.

Overall, probably not worth it. But still… let’s see those
leaflets!

Incidentally, being an Elector is technically an elected office,
and it’s exclusive in NC; you can’t hold any other elected office
while acting as an Elector, and I’d have to resign any other
position. That’s probably one reason I got the job… many other
people in the party weren’t eligible.

NC §163-209 states, “A vote for the candidates named on the
ballot shall be a vote for the electors of the party or
unaffiliated candidate by which those candidates were nominated and
whose names have been filed with the Secretary of State.” You read
that right… in North Carolina, a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote
for Doug Schepers (and 14 other Electors)!

Like almost all other states, NC is a winner-take-all election.
If Hillary doesn’t win the popular vote in NC, then I don’t get to
take a trip to Raleigh on December 19, and I don’t get the $44 a
day and 17¢ per mile paid to Presidential electors (per NCGS
§163-211.) Vote for Hillary… I need the money!

The Old Ceremony

I’m tickled pink that I might have the ceremonial role of
electing the first woman President of the United States, but we
still need to fix this broken system, and I’d like to help do that
however I can. As I responded to my friend Eric
Brown’s tongue-in-cheek question, “So what are you going to
major in?”: “Electoral Engineering, of course.”

Why is the Electoral College a Bad Idea?

I just voted early in NC for Clinton/Kaine! I hope to vote for
them again as an Electoral College member in December! #VoteEarlyVoteOften

I don’t really get 2 votes. Because actually, there is
no popular vote for President; there is a popular vote for
Electors, per NC
§163-209.

And while an Elector in NC cannot be a Faithless Elector, other
states don’t have that restriction. In Georgia,
a Republican Elector vowed not to vote for Donald Trump, the
nominee of the Republican Party, which is most likely going to win
Georgia. This would be fodder for the conspiracy-minded who think
the elections are rigged. Luckily, that Faithless Elector resigned,
but it could still happen this election with some other
Elector.

As much as I want Trump to lose –and I want him to lose badly– I
want him to lose fair-and-square.

The Electoral College also skews issues and campaigns to focus
only on a few key states; the rest of the states are largely
ignored, especially reliably Red or Blue states. You’d think that
would actually mean that the candidates have to woo a set of
centrist states, but it doesn’t work that way… they have to go to
the extremes, especially the Republicans (as shown by the Tea Party
and Trump), or to drift away from the Progressive view. That is,
they have to maintain status quo or play to anxiety and fear.

Some claim that the Electoral College is the last firewall
against a poorly-informed or emotionally-manipulated populace. To
this, I draw attention to Exhibit A: Donald Trump. The Electoral
College holds no succor there.

I have no deep insights about the negative effects of the
Electoral College, other than the received wisdom of others who’ve
looked at it. But it adds an unnecessary level of abstraction away
from democracy, which raises real questions of the legitimacy of
governance that we can scarce afford now. We need people to have
faith that their voice matters, or they won’t bother to speak out
at all.

November 07, 2016

Among the various controversies and confusions about voting in
North Carolina, seemingly designed to impede voters from exercising
their franchise, there’s some conventional wisdom about whether or
not you can use your mobile phone at the polls.

Poll officials are instructed not to allow a voter to use
their mobile phone in any way while in or around the voting
area, citing NC
General Statute 163 Article 14A. I’m not a lawyer, but my
reading of this statute leads me to think this is misguided, wrong,
and harmful. This interpretation of NC GS 163 should be challenged
in court, since it exerts a chilling effect on voting.

I’ll run through my interpretation and how it applies to a
few scenarios. I welcome comments, questions, and
corrections.

Rationale for Prohibition

There are two primary reasons given for why mobile phones are
not permitted at the polls, explained by Don Wright, general
counsel for the State Board of Elections, in a 2012 WRAL
article, “Smartphones
not smart at the polls”:

Assistance Clause

Wright claims that it violates §163–165.1 to receive voting
advice at the polls:

First, NC Statute 163-165.1 bans voters from receiving
assistance at the ballot box except from a close family member or a
few other exceptions that require prior arrangement with precinct
officials.

NC Statute 163–165.1 says nothing about receiving
assistance, and deals only with how ballots are handled:

§ 163-165.1. Scope and general rules.

(a) Scope. – This Article shall apply to all elections in this
State.

(b) Requirements of Official Ballots in Voting. – In any
election conducted under this Article:

(1) All voting shall be by official ballot.

(2) Only votes cast on an official ballot shall be
counted.

(c) Compliance With This Article. – All ballots shall comply
with the provisions of this Article.

(d) Other Uses Prohibited. – An official ballot shall not be
used for any purpose not authorized by this Article.

(e) Voted ballots and paper and electronic records of
individual voted ballots shall be treated as confidential, and no
person other than elections officials performing their duties may
have access to voted ballots or paper or electronic records of
individual voted ballots except by court order or order of the
appropriate board of elections as part of the resolution of an
election protest or investigation of an alleged election
irregularity or violation. Voted ballots and paper and electronic
records of individual voted ballots shall not be disclosed to
members of the public in such a way as to disclose how a particular
voter voted, unless a court orders otherwise. Any person who has
access to an official voted ballot or record and knowingly
discloses in violation of this section how an individual has voted
that ballot is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor. (2001-460, s. 3;
2002-159, s. 55(o); 2005-323, s. 1(f); 2007-391, s. 9(a).)

This is likely a simple misquote, and Wright probably
meant §163–166.8. Wright continued in the article:

Wright says a voter on the phone could be talking or texting
with someone working for a campaign. “There’s a presumption
that operation of a cell phone in a voting booth is unlawful
assistance.”

I’m not sure who is making this presumption, but the term
“assistance” is used ambiguously here. “Assistance” could mean:

Help in deciding who to vote for; or

Help in the mechanical operations of voting, such as entering
or leaving the polling booth, marking the ballot, or submitting the
completed ballot.

The prohibitory interpretation conflates these, but the law
itself distinguishes them:

§ 163-166.8. Assistance to voters.

(a) Any registered voter qualified to vote in the election
shall be entitled to assistance with entering and exiting the
voting booth and in preparing ballots in accordance with the
following rules:

(1) Any voter is entitled to assistance from the voter’s
spouse, brother, sister, parent, grandparent, child, grandchild,
mother-in-law, father-in-law, daughter-in-law, son-in-law,
stepparent, or stepchild, as chosen by the voter.

(2) A voter in any of the following four categories is entitled
to assistance from a person of the voter’s choice, other than the
voter’s employer or agent of that employer or an officer or agent
of the voter’s union:

a. A voter who, on account of physical disability, is unable to
enter the voting booth without assistance.

b. A voter who, on account of physical disability, is unable to
mark a ballot without assistance.

c. A voter who, on account of illiteracy, is unable to mark a
ballot without assistance.

d. A voter who, on account of blindness, is unable to enter the
voting booth or mark a ballot without assistance.

…

(c) A person rendering assistance to a voter in an election
shall be admitted to the voting booth with the voter being
assisted. The State Board of Elections shall promulgate rules
governing voter assistance, and those rules shall adhere to the
following guidelines:

(1) The person rendering assistance shall not in any manner
seek to persuade or induce any voter to cast any vote in any
particular way.

So, a registered qualified voter may ask for assistance in the
mechanical operations of voting (which is good), but the person
helping them cannot force or even hint at how the voter should vote
(which is also good). As an aside, the law doesn’t impose any
expectation that the helper accurately represent the options or
record the ballot according to the wishes of the voter, nor offer
penalties if the helper doesn’t act in good faith, which seems a
glaring omission.

This statute clearly prohibits the operational helper from
offering advice, but it doesn’t stipulate that the voter can’t seek
advice from anyone of their choosing at any time. I ask my wife for
advice on local referenda, or to remind me of my own previous
voting decisions. This seems to be allowed under any reasonable
circumstance, and by my reading of §163–166.8, should apply
even in the voting booth if my wife isn’t also providing me
with operational assistance. §163–166.8 clearly
applies to the conditions of operational assistance only.

If the NC General Assembly or State Board of
Elections wants a different effect, they should pass a more
specific law, not loosely interpret §163–166.8.

This means that I should be able to legally use my mobile device
to seek advice from anyone I wish, even while in the voting booth.
The law doesn’t prohibit me to text someone (but not call, because
my conversation could be overheard and interpreted as campaigning),
to search the Web, or to consult my own pre-written research which
happens to be on my phone (as opposed to a piece of paper). Perhaps
there’s some other statute I’m not aware of which prohibits that,
but §163–166.8 does not, and shouldn’t be used that way.

Photography Clause

Wright also asserts that it’s illegal for you to photograph your
own ballot:

Second, under NC Statute 163-166.3, it’s illegal to take photos
of voters or completed ballots, “except with the permission of both
the voter and the chief judge of the precinct.”

Banning people from photographing other people’s ballots is just
common sense, Wright says. “It’s a violation of the secret
ballot.”

If it’s your ballot, why can’t you take a photo of it?
Wright says it’s to partly protect the vote – and partly to
protect you.

In another state several years ago, a criminal vote-buying
scheme used such photos. Vote-sellers were given cell phones and
told to take a picture of their completed ballots to prove they had
earned their payment.

“We don’t have a lot of trouble with vote buying in NC,” Wright
said. “But we don’t want to encourage it, either.”

He says the ban also protects voters from outside pressure.
Several years ago in Italy, Wright says, members of the Mafia were
told to bring back photos of their ballots to prove they voted for
the candidates supported by their crime syndicate.

Wright says without the photo ban, an unscrupulous employer
could exert the same type of pressure here in North Carolina.

This is a legitimate concern, and a plausible rationale. I might
differ on whether this is the right solution to the real problem,
but I don’t see this as a impediment to the voting process
itself.

I’m unable to find a substantive report about vote-buyers
passing out mobile phones for vote-sellers to take pictures in some
unnamed state, and it makes me uncomfortable that interpretations
of laws might rest on hearsay, though there are recently recorded
cases of “vote buying” in
Kentucky and elsewhere. The Washington Post published a
2012 article, “Selling
votes is common type of election fraud” –with prices
ranging from a tank of gas or half a pint of liquor all the
way up to $800– but noted that “Voter fraud, by any method, is
still rare.”

Absentee ballots are a far more reliable way to buy votes than
ones cast at the polls. That’s partly because of it does seem to be
illegal to photograph your own ballot in North Carolina, as Wright
says:

§ 163-166.3. Limited access to the voting
enclosure.

…

(b) Photographing Voters Prohibited. – No person shall
photograph, videotape, or otherwise record the image of any voter
within the voting enclosure, except with the permission of both the
voter and the chief judge of the precinct. If the voter is a
candidate, only the permission of the voter is required. This
subsection shall also apply to one-stop sites under G.S. 163-227.2.
This subsection does not apply to cameras used as a regular part of
the security of the facility that is a voting place or one-stop
site.

If you can’t photograph your ballot, then a prospective
vote-buyer can’t verify that you voted the way they wanted (of
course, it’s no guarantee anyway: you could simply photograph your
ballot with their chosen votes marked on it, then request a
replacement ballot that you use to vote the way you actually
want).

I’m not sure what “any purpose not otherwise permitted under
law” means; what are the permitted purposes for photographing a
ballot? I don’t know enough legal convention to track down the
references at the end of the clause that might have shed light on
that.

So, you can’t use a camera in the “voting enclosure”. Just what
is the legal definition of a“voting enclosure”?

Where does this apply?

These voting statues are clear about the locational scoping for
these provisions:

§ 163-165. Definitions.

…

(8) “Voting booth” means the private space in which a voter is
to mark an official ballot.

(9) “Voting enclosure” means the room within the voting place
that is used for voting.

(10) “Voting place” means the building or area of the building
that contains the voting enclosure.

So, the voting enclosure referred to in §163–166.3 refers
to the rooms set aside for voting, while the booth itself is where
you mark your ballot.

FAQ

Can I take a photo of people intimidating others or otherwise
suppressing voters?

Yes! You can take a photo of anyone outside the “voting
enclosure”, and since it’s illegal to do campaigning inside or
directly around the voting enclosure, or to be inside the voting
enclosure except while voting, any photo you take of someone
intimidating others in the area outside is legal.

§ 163-166.4. Limitation on activity in the voting place
and in a buffer zone around it.

(a) Buffer Zone. – No person or group of persons shall hinder
access, harass others, distribute campaign literature, place
political advertising, solicit votes, or otherwise engage in
election-related activity in the voting place or in a buffer zone
which shall be prescribed by the county board of elections around
the voting place. In determining the dimensions of that buffer zone
for each voting place, the county board of elections shall, where
practical, set the limit at 50 feet from the door of entrance to
the voting place, measured when that door is closed, but in no
event shall it set the limit at more than 50 feet or at less than
25 feet.

In fact, taking photos is exactly what you should be doing, to
help document any problems for later law suits. There is a meme
circulating that advises you to do just that:

I’ve been trained as a non-partisan Voter Protection poll
watcher, and I plan to go to a smaller town in NC to help ensure
fairness at the polls. I took extra training to help deal with
possible organized voter intimidation, and one of the main
takeaways was not to confront anyone or try to de-escalate the
situation, but simply to document it and call the Election Protection Hotline:
888-OUR-VOTE | 888-687-8683.

So, take photographs of anything suspicious, but protect
yourself and be safe.

Caveat: There may be voter suppression
happening in the voting enclosure, though we hope it’s rare. The
poll workers might not be dealing with it properly, or the
intimidation or suppression may be coming from the poll workers
themselves (e.g. turning away voters that don’t have photo IDs, not
offering provisional ballots, etc.). It’s still illegal for you to
photograph incidents of voter suppression inside the voting
enclosure! Don’t do it. You can ask names, take notes, or
record information in other ways, but you can’t take photographs.
Immediately call the Election Protection
Hotline (888-OUR-VOTE | 888-687-8683) and report the
incident.

Can I take a photo of my completed ballot in North Carolina?
Can I post a ballot-selfie on socials?

No. That’s still illegal in North Carolina and many other
states. This has been changing in some states, though, so
it might also change in North Carolina.

Can I use my phone to look up my voting choices?

Yes. There seems to be some gray area here, so you might want to
be discreet –getting your vote cast is the most important
thing– but this seems to be legal. There have been incidents in NC
of poll judges saying this is illegal, or even posting signs
saying it’s illegal. I’ve seen this happen myself even in the
progressive stronghold of Chapel Hill. I think this is due to bad
training of poll officials.

Even though this should be legal, you might be confronted by
poll officials telling you to turn off your phone. If this happens,
ask them to let you step outside the voting enclosure and write
down your voting choices (or prepare a paper list in advance).

This ambiguity is insidious, because it largely targets younger
voters, who are more likely to rely on smartphones for this as they
do for other tasks, and who are less likely to vote. We should
reduce barriers to younger voters, not put up walls against
democracy.

Can I use my phone to text others for advice? Can I access
voter guides on the Web?

I don’t know. My opinion is that you should be able to, but
that’s not a legal opinion, and it’s not based on any reading of
any specific statute.

My advice is to get a sample ballot outside while you’re waiting
in line (there are likely to be partisans handing these out),
and do any phone calls or texts or web browsing for advice before
you enter the voting enclosure. This also decreases the wait time
for others in line, ensuring everyone has an equal chance to
vote.

November 06, 2016

Some more notes for future reference. The following scripts in
Unicode 9.0 have both upper and lower case characters.

In modern use

Latin
Greek
Cyrillic
Armenian
Cherokee
Adlam

Limited modern use

Coptic
Warang Citi
Old Hungarian
Osage

No longer used

Georgian*
Glagolitic
Deseret

I include characters used for phonetic transcriptions in
Latin.

There are also case correspondences in the following Unicode
blocks: Number Forms, Enclosed Alphanumerics, Alphabetic
Presentation Forms, Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms. Mathematical
Alphanumeric Symbols also has both upper and lower case forms, but
they are not convertible, one to the other.

Georgian is a little special. Modern Georgian is unicameral. An
attempt was made to write it in a bicameral way in the 1950s, but
it didn’t catch on.

October 23, 2016

A new Pinyin phonetics
web app is now available. As you type Hanyu pinyin in the top box,
a phonetic transcription appears in the lower box.

I put this app together to help me get closer to the correct
pronunciation of names of people, cities, etc. that I come across
while reading about Chinese history. There was often some
combination of letters that I couldn’t quite remember how to
pronounce.

It’s not intended to be perfect, though I think it’s pretty good
overall. It works with input whether or not it has tonal accents.
If you can suggest improvements, please raise a
github issue.

See the notes file
for a description of the less obvious phonetic symbols.

In case you want something to play with, here’s the text in the
picture: Dìzào zhēnzhèng quánqiú tōngxíng de wànwéiwǎng. It means
“Making the World Wide Web truly worldwide”, and the Han version is
缔造真正全球通行的万维网.

September 30, 2016

This shows the durations of dynasties and kingdoms of China
during the period known as the 16 Kingdoms. Click on the image
below to see an interactive version with a guide that follows your
cursor and indicates the year.

Update 2016-10-03: I found it easier to work with
the chart if the kingdoms are grouped by name/proximity, so changed
the default to that. You can, however, still access
the strictly chronological version.

September 16, 2016

A new Persian Character
Picker web app is now available. The picker allows you to
produce or analyse runs of Persian text using the Arabic script.
Character pickers are especially useful for people who don’t know a
script well, as characters are displayed in ways that aid
identification.

The picker is able to produce UN transcriptions of the text in
the box. The transcription appears just below the input box, where
you can copy it, move it into the input box at the caret, or delete
it. In order to obtain a full transcription it is necessary to add
short vowel diactritics to places that could have more than one
pronunciation, but the picker can work out the vowels needed for
many letter combinations.

September 07, 2016

These are notes culled from various places. There may well
be some copy-pasting involved, but I did it long enough ago that I
no longer remember all the sources. But these are notes, it’s not
an article.

Case conversions are not always possible in Unicode by applying
an offset to a codepoint, although this can work for the ASCII
range by adding 32, or by adding 1 for many other characters in the
Latin extensions. There are many cases where the corresponding
cased character is in another block, or in an irregularly offset
location.

In addition, there are linguistic issues that mean that simple
mappings of one character to another are not sufficient for case
conversion.

In German, the uppercase of ß is SS. German and Greek cannot,
however, be easily transformed from upper to lower case: German
because SS could be converted either to ß or ss, depending on the
word; Greek because all tonos marks are omitted in upper case, eg.
does ΑΘΗΝΑ convert to Αθηνά (the goddess) or Αθήνα (capital of
Greece)? German may also uppercase ß to ẞ sometimes for things like
signboards.

Also Greek converts uppercase sigma to either a final or
non-final form, depending on the position in a word, eg. ΟΔΥΣΣΕΥΣ
becomes οδυσσευς. This contextual difference is easy to manage,
however, compared to the lexical issues in the previous
paragraph.

In Serbo-Croatian there is an important distinction between
uppercase and titlecase. The single letter ǆ converts to Ǆ when the
whole word is uppercased, but ǅ when titlecased. Both of these
forms revert to ǆ in lowercase, so there is no ambiguity here.

In Dutch, the titlecase of ijsvogel is IJsvogel, ie. which
commonly means that the first two letters have to be titlecased.
There is a single character Ĳ (U+0132 LATIN
CAPITAL LIGATURE IJ) in Unicode that will behave as
expected, but this single character is very often not available on
a keyboard, and so the word is commonly written with the two
letters I+J.

In Greek, tonos diacritics are dropped during uppercasing, but
not dialytika. Greek diphthongs with tonos over the first vowel are
converted during uppercasing to no tonos but a dialytika over the
second vowel in the diphthong, eg. Νεράιδα becomes ΝΕΡΑΪΔΑ. A
letter with both tonos and dialytika above drops the tonos but
keeps the dialytika, eg. ευφυΐα becomes ΕΥΦΥΪΑ. Also, contrary to
the initial rule mentioned here, Greek does not drop the tonos on
the disjunctive eta (usually meaning ‘or’), eg. ήσουν ή εγώ ή εσύ
becomes ΗΣΟΥΝ Ή ΕΓΩ Ή ΕΣΥ (note that the initial eta is not
disjunctive, and so does drop the tonos). This is to maintain the
distinction between ‘either/or’ ή from the η feminine form of the
article, in the nominative case, singular number.

Greek titlecased vowels, ie. a vowel at the start of a word that
is uppercased, retains its tonos accent, eg. Όμηρος.

Turkish, Azeri, Tatar and Bashkir pair dotted and undotted i’s,
which requires special handling for case conversion, that is
language-specific. For example, the name of the second largest city
in Turkey is “Diyarbakır”, which contains both the dotted and
dotless letters i. When rendered into upper case, this word appears
like this: DİYARBAKIR.

Lithuanian also has language-specific rules that retain the dot
over i when combined with accents, eg. i̇̀ i̇́ i̇̃, whereas the
capital I has no dot.

Sometimes European French omits accents from uppercase letters,
whereas French Canadian typically does not. However, this is more
of a stylistic than a linguistic rule. Sometimes French people
uppercase œ to OE, but this is mostly due to issues with lack of
keyboard support, it seems (as is the issue with French
accents).

Capitalisation may ignore leading symbols and punctuation for a
word, and titlecase the first casing letter. This applies not only
to non-letters. A letter such as the (non-casing version of the)
glottal stop, ʔ, may be ignored at the start of a word, and the
following letter titlecased, in IPA or Americanist phonetic
transcriptions. (Note that, to avoid confusion, there are separate
case paired characters available for use in orthographies such as
Chipewyan, Dogrib and Slavey. These are Ɂ and ɂ.)

Another issue for titlecasing is that not all words in a
sequence are necessarily titlecased. German uses capital letters to
start noun words, but not verbs or adjectives. French and Italian
may expect to titlecase the ‘A’ in “L’Action”, since that is the
start of a word. In English, it is common not to titlecase words
like ‘for’, ‘of’, ‘the’ and so forth in titles.

Unicode provides only algorithms for generic case conversion and
case folding. CLDR provides some more detail, though it is hard to
programmatically achieve all the requirements for case
conversion.

Case folding is a way of converting to a standard sequence of
(lowercase) characters that can be used for comparisons of strings.
(Note that this sequence may not represent normal lowercase text:
for example, both the uppercase Greek sigma and lowercase final
sigma are converted to a normal sigma, and the German ß is
converted to ‘ss’.) There are also different flavours of case
folding available: common, full, and simple.

August 30, 2016

The language
subtag lookup tool now has links to Wikipedia search for all
languages and scripts listed. This helps for finding information
about languages, now that SIL limits access to their Ethnologue,
and offers a new source of information for the scripts listed.

August 17, 2016

A couple weeks ago, on July 27th, during a routine colonoscopy,
they found a mass in my ascending colon which turned out to have
some cancer cells.

I immediately went to UNC Hospital, a world-class local teaching
hospital, and they did a CT scan on me. There are no signs that the
cancer has spread. I was asymptomatic, so they caught it very
early. The only reason I did the colonoscopy is that there’s a
history of colon cancer in my family.

Yesterday, I had surgery to remove my ascending colon (an
operation they call a “right colectomy”). They used a robot (named
da
Vinci!) operated by their chief GI oncology surgeon, and made 5
small incisions: 4 on the left side of my belly to cut out that
part of the right colon; and a slightly larger one below my belly
to remove the tissue (ruining my bikini line).

Everything went fine (I made sure in advance that this was a
good robot and not a killer robot that might pull a gun on me), and
I’m recovering well. I walked three times today so far, and
even drank some clear liquids. I’ll probably be back on my feet and
at home sometime this weekend. Visitors are welcome!

There are very few long-term negative effects from this surgery,
if any.

They still don’t know for certain what stage the cancer was at,
or if it’s spread to my lymph nodes; they’ll be doing a biopsy on
my removed colon and lymph nodes to determine if I have to do
chemotherapy. As of right now, they are optimistic that it has not
spread, and even if it has, the chemo for this kind of cancer is
typically pretty mild. If it hasn’t spread (or “metastasized”),
then I’m already cured by having the tumor removed. In either case,
I’m going to recover quickly.

My Dad had colon cancer, and came through fine. My eldest sister
also had colon cancer over a decade ago, and it had even
metastasized, and her chemo went fine… and cancer treatments have
greatly improved in the past few years.

So, nobody should worry. I didn’t mention it widely, because I
didn’t want to cause needless grief to anyone until after the
operation was done. Cancer is such a scary word, and I don’t think
this is going to be as serious as it might otherwise sound.

I’ll be seeing a geneticist in the coming weeks to determine
exactly what signature of cancer I have, so I know what I’m dealing
with. And I want to give more information to my family, because
this runs in our genes, and if I’d gotten a colonoscopy a few years
ago, they could have removed the polyp in the early stages and I’d
have never developed cancer. (And because I’m otherwise
healthy, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the colonoscopy if I
hadn’t had insurance, which I probably wouldn’t have had if
Obamacare didn’t mandate it. Thanks, Obama!)

Yay, science!

Future Plans

So, the cliché here is for me to say that this has opened my
eyes to the ephemerality and immediacy of life, and that I’m
planning to make major decisions in my life that prioritize what I
truly value, based on my experience with cancer.

But the fact is, I’ve already been doing that recently, and
while the cancer underscores this, I’ve already been making big
plans for the future. I’ll post soon about some exciting new
projects I’m trying to get underway, things that are far outside my
comfort zone for which I’ll need to transform myself (you know, in
a not-cancerous sort of way). I’ve already reduced my hours at W3C
to 50%, and I’m looking at changing my role and remaining time
there; I love the mission of W3C, which I see as a valuable
kind of public service, so no matter what, I’ll probably stay
involved there in some capacity for the foreseeable future. But I
feel myself pulled toward building software and social systems, not
just specifications. Stay tuned for more soon!

I’m optimistic and excited, not just about leaving
behind this roadbump of cancer, but of new possibilities and
new missions to change the world for the better in my own small
ways.

Update:

Today (Friday, 26 August), I got the results of my biopsy from
my oncologist, and I’m pleased to announce that I have no more
colon cancer! The results were that the cancer was
“well-differentiated, no activity in lymph nodes”, meaning that
there was no metastasis, and I’m cured. This whole “adventure”
emerged, played out, and concluded in just a month: I heard there
was a tumor, was diagnosed with cancer, consulted an oncologist,
had surgery, recovered, and got my cancer-free results all in 30
days. It felt much longer!

August 08, 2016

North
Carolina House Bill 2 (aka, “HB2”, or the “Public Facilities
Privacy & Security Act”, or simply “the Bathroom Bill”), which
among other things prohibits transgender people
from using the bathroom designated to the sex of their
identity, is going to force another step forward in civil
liberties.

Four years ago, in the 2012 gubernatorial election season, the
North Carolina General Assembly, controlled by Republicans,
passed North
Carolina Amendment 1 (aka, “SB514”, or “An Act to Amend
the Constitution to Provide That Marriage Between One Man and One
Woman is the Only Domestic Legal Union That Shall Be Valid or
Recognized in This State”), which called for a public referendum on
the issue of constitutionally
banning same-sex marriage.

From its inception, this bill was doomed to have no long-term
relevance; it was cast in the mold of the polemical
2008 California Proposition 8. Already, the battle lines were
being drawn for the national legalization of same-sex marriage: the
military’s restrictive “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy had been
repealed, and the Department of Defense was permitting military
chaplains to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies; President Obama
had announced his support for marriage equality; challenges to Prop
8 were wending their way to the Supreme Court; and public polling
indicated that a
slender-but-growing majority of Americans approved of same-sex
marriage. Predictably, in July 2014, the 4th Circuit U.S.
Court of Appeals overturned an equivalent bill
in Virginia, declaring it unconstitutional, thus nullifying
NC’s Amendment 1. Why did NC legislators waste so much time, money,
and energy on a bill they had to know wouldn’t last?

Because this was about more than just the bill itself. It was a
dog whistle, or maybe a bullhorn, to rally conservatives around the
state to come to the polls. A well-funded campaign of
anti-marriage-equality groups spread across rural NC,
especially conservative Christian groups, from the famous
evangelical pastor Reverend Billy Graham, to two NC Roman Catholic
bishops, to the Christian-funded Vote for Marriage NC, to the
pulpit activism of ministers around the state. The message wasn’t
just “vote for Amendment 1”, it was “vote for
conservatives”; Representative Mark Hilton (R-Catawba)
said, “One of the issues [conservative groups] have
come to me about is the marriage amendment. It’s important to the
conservative groups that we get this passed this year because they
need that to be able to get their ground game working to get the
maximum effect to get out the vote.” It was a heavily divisive
issue, one that played to the deepest emotions of
conservatives, and the public debate energized the voters, and
helped usher in a new conservative Republican governor, Pat
McCrory, after 20 years of fairly progressive Democratic governors
(and a
longer history of less-progressive Democratic governors before
that).

So, is it really a coincidence that 4 years later, in the 2016
gubernatorial election season, the North Carolina General Assembly,
controlled by Republicans, passed a bill that limits the rights of
a gender minority? Or that some of them are calling for a public
referendum? Or that they diverted $500K from the state’s
Emergency Response and Disaster Relief fund to defend the
fore-doomed HB2 in court against the U.S. Department of Justice,
maintaining the controversy and the press for the next several
months until the November election? I don’t think it will have the
saving grace for Pat McCrory that it did last time, however; it’s
already
cost the state millions of dollars in revenue, and it’s made us
an international laughing-stock.

Like Amendment 1 before it, HB2 is destined to be overturned, a
footnote in history. But in the meantime, it’s causing real harm to
real people; phone calls to
Trans Lifeline, the nonprofit transgender crisis hotline, doubled
after the passage of HB2; and some bigots feel emboldened to
mock or even harm transgender people in the name of this law. This
must have been profoundly disappointing for the human rights
activists in Charlotte who’ve spent years working to make NC more
inclusive, and who scored a victory with the Charlotte City Council
with the passage of
Charlotte Ordinance 7056 (aka, “An Ordinance Amending Chapter 2
of the Charlotte City Code Entitled “Administration”, Chapter 12
Entitled “Human Relations”, and Chapter 22 Entitled “Vehicles for
Hire””), only to have it struck down at the state level by HB2. So,
why am I praising HB2, rather than Charlotte Ordinance 7056?

Because, as good as the intention was behind Charlotte Ordinance
7056, if left unopposed, it would have had minor and purely local
effect, rather than the transformative societal effect of HB2.

California’s Prop 8, banning same-sex marriage, was the critical
event that made same-sex marriage legal across the entire US, in
three notable ways:

The public debate forced people to form an opinion on the
issue, and when pressed on it, most people decided that either they
were in support of marriage equality or that it simply wasn’t their
business to dictate what other adults did;

It inspired contrary legislation in several other states,
legalizing same-sex marriage there;

It forced the issue to be resolved in the courts, rather than
the timid Congress.

Federal laws are made in two ways in the USA; either they are
enacted by Congress; or they are decided as interpretations of the
Constitution by the Supreme Court (or its lower district courts).
Though same-sex marriage was trending upward in favorability among
Americans, it would likely have been decades before Congress would
have acted on that; members of Congress are too afraid of strong
action on contentious issues, lest it endanger their reelection;
and no single party is likely to have a clear mandate to act
unilaterally for the next several elections. (A cynical view might
assert that controversial issues –like same-sex marriage, gun
control, health care, and abortion– are kept unresolved so the
parties have strong, emotional differentiators to garner voters,
but I prefer to ascribe it to simple inability.) So, the courts
brought in marriage equality at least a decade, and probably much
longer, than would have been possible from Congress. And this has
been a huge step forward in civil rights, positively affecting
hundreds of thousands of lives, and giving millions of people their
dignity.

And these laws do more than just determine how people are
treated by the government. They set a normative expectation among
the public. Same-sex marriage is enjoying more popular support now
not only because the law reflects how people feel… people feel
differently because of the law itself. At their best, laws are a
reflection and reinforcement and declaration of shared social
values.

So ask yourself, and be honest: Were you concerned about
the rights of transgender people a year ago? Were you inspired to
march in the streets, attend rallies, or even post on social media
about it?

I wasn’t. Sure, if you’d asked me, I would have said truthfully
that I thought transgender people should have the same rights as
others. But I wouldn’t have felt that strongly about it.

And then HB2 happened. In my state. And I was forced to form an
opinion.

And I took to the streets.

Because, who are we, as a state? Who am I, as a citizen? I’ll
tell you, clearly, in the face of legal claims by representatives
of my state government: “We are not this.”

We are not punching down. We are not petty. We are not
oppressive. We are not exclusionary.

Still, if same-sex marriage was yet decades away, how long in
the future were transgender rights? How many years and how many
lives until we cared?

But now, around the country, around the world, people are
defiantly defining themselves by what they are not, on an issue
that had not even been on their radar: “We are not this.”

I may not know much about law, but I know what I don’t like.

“We are not this.”

I can’t predict if HB2, this bigoted bill, will help
conservatives maintain control of the North Carolina state
government for another term. But I do know its one inevitable
effect: however hurtful it will be for transgender people in its
short life, and though some of those affected may not live to see
the long-term benefits, it will give transgender people their legal
dignity ever after.

So, self-styled “social conservatives”, keep bringing us
hateful, hurtful laws. Keep pushing against the tide of history.
Keep forcing us to form an opinion. Please.

June 28, 2016

An updated version of the Unicode Character
Converter web app is now available. This app allows you to
convert characters between various different formats and
notations.

Significant changes include the following:

It’s now possible to generate EcmaScript6 style escapes for
supplementary characters in the JavaScript output field, eg.
\u{10398} rather than \uD800\uDF98.

In many cases, clicking on a checkbox option now applies the
change straight away if there is content in the associated output
field. (There are 4 output fields where this doesn’t happen because
we aren’t dealing with escapes and there are problems with spaces
and delimiters.)

By default, the JavaScript output no longer escapes the ASCII
characters that can be represented by \n, \r, \t, \’ and \”. A new
checkbox is provided to force those transformations if needed. This
should make the JS transform much more useful for general
conversions.

The code to transform to HTML/XML can now replace RLI, LRI, FSI
and PDI if the Convert bidi controls to HTML markup
option is set.

The code to transform to HTML/XML can convert many more
invisible or ambiguous characters to escapes if the Escape
invisible characters option is set.

UTF-16 code points are all at least 4 digits long.

Fixed a bug related to U+00A0 when converting to HTML/XML.

The order of the output fields was changed, and various small
improvements were made to the user interface.

June 21, 2016

UniView now supports Unicode
version 9, which is being released today, including all changes
made during the beta period. (As before, images are not available
for the Tangut additions, but the character information is
available.)

This version of UniView also introduces a new filter feature.
Below each block or range of characters is a set of links that
allows you to quickly highlight characters with the property
letter, mark, number,
punctuation, or symbol. For more fine-grained
property distinctions, see the Filter
panel.

In addition, for some blocks there are other links available
that reflect tags assigned to characters. This tagging is
far from exhaustive! For instance, clicking on
sanskrit will not show all characters used
in Sanskrit.

The tags are just intended to be an aid to help you find certain
characters quickly by exposing words that appear in the character
descriptions or block subsection titles. For example, if you want
to find the Bengali currency symbol while viewing the Bengali
block, click on currency and all other
characters but those related to currency will be dimmed.

(Since the highlight function is used for this, don’t forget
that, if you happen to highlight a useful subset of characters and
want to work with just those, you can use the Make
list from highlights command, or click on the upwards
pointing arrow icon below the text area to move those characters
into the text area.)

March 25, 2016

This blog post introduces the first of a set of historical maps
of Europe that can be displayed at the same scale so that you can
compare political or ethnographic boundaries from one time to the
next. The first set covers the period from 362 AD to 830 AD.

A key aim here is to allow you to switch from map to map and see
how boundaries evolve across an unchanging background.

The information in the maps is derived mostly from information
in Colin McEvedy’s excellent series of books, in particular (so
far) The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, but
also sometimes brings in information from the Times History
of Europe. Boundaries are approximate for a number of
reasons: first, in the earlier times especially, the borders were
only approximate anyway, second, I have deduced the boundary
information from small-scale maps and (so far) only a little
additional research, third, the sources sometimes differ about
where boundaries lay. I hope to refine the data during future
research, in the meantime take this information as grosso
modo.

The link below the picture takes you to a chronological summary
of events that lie behind the changes in the maps. Click on the
large dates to open maps in a separate window. (Note that all maps
will open in that window, and you may have to ensure that it isn’t
hidden behind the chronology page.)

The background to the SVG overlay is a map that shows relief and
rivers, as well as modern country boundaries (the dark lines).
These were things which, as good as McEvedy’s maps were, I was
always missing in order to get useful reference points. Since the
outlines and text are created in SVG, you can zoom in to see
details.

This is just the first stage, and the maps are still largely
first drafts. The plan is to refine the details for existing maps
and add many more. So far we only deal with Europe. In the future
I’d like to deal with other places, if I can find sources.

March 19, 2016

UniView now supports the
characters introduced for the beta version of Unicode 9. Any
changes made during the beta period will be added when Unicode 9 is
officially released. (Images are not available for the Tangut
additions, but the character information is available.)

It also brings in notes for individual characters where those
notes exist, if Show notes is selected. These notes are not
authoritative, but are provided in case they prove useful.

A new icon was added below the text area to add commas between
each character in the text area.

Links to the help page that used to appear on mousing over a
control have been removed. Instead there is a noticeable, blue link
to the help page, and the help page has been reorganised and uses
image maps so that it is easier to find information. The
reorganisation puts more emphasis on learning by exploration,
rather than learning by reading.

March 07, 2016

The data behind the keyword search has now been completely
updated to reflect descriptions by Gardiner and Allen. If you work
with those lists it should now be easy to locate hieroglyphs using
keywords. The search mechanism has also been rewritten so that you
don’t need to type keywords in a particular order for them to
match. I also strip out various common function words and do some
other optimisation before attempting a match.

The other headline news is the addition of various controls
above the text area, including one that will render MdC text as a
two-dimensional arrangement of hieroglyphs. To do this, I adapted
WikiHiero’s PHP code to run in javascript. You can see an example
of the output in the picture attached to this post. If you want to
try it, the MdC text to put in the text area is:
anx-G5-zmA:tA:tA-nbty-zmA:tA:tA-sw:t-bit:t-
-zA-ra:.-mn:n-T:w-Htp:t*p->-anx-D:t:N17-!

The result should look like this:

Other new controls allow you to convert MdC text to hieroglyphs,
and vice versa, or to type in a Unicode phonetic transcription and
find the hieroglyphs it represents. (This may still need a little
more work.)

I also moved the help text from the notes area to a separate
file, with a nice clickable picture of the picker at the top that
will link to particular features. You can get to that page by
clicking on the blue Help box near the
bottom of the picker.

Finally, you can now set the text area to display characters
from right to left, in right-aligned lines, using more controls > Output direction. Unfortunately, i
don’t know of a font that under these conditions will flip the
hieroglyphs horizontally so that they face the right way.

For more information about the new features, and how to use the
picker, see
the Help page.

February 29, 2016

Over the weekend I added a set of new features to the picker for
Egyptian Hieroglyphs, aimed at making it easier to locate a
particular hieroglyph. Here is a run-down of various methods now
available.

Category-based input

This was the original method. Characters are grouped into
standard categories. Click on one of the orange characters, chosen
as a nominal representative of the class, to show below all the
characters in that category. Click on one of those to add it to the
output box. As you mouse over the orange characters, you’ll see the
name of the category appear just below the output box.

Keyword-search-based input

The app associates most hieroglyphs with keywords that describe
the glyph. You can search for glyphs using those keywords in the
input field labelled Search for.

Searching for ripple will match both
ripple and ripples. Searching for
king will match king and
walking. If you want to only match whole words,
surround the search term with colons, ie. :ripple: or
:king:.

Note that the keywords are written in British English, so you
need to look for sceptre rather than
scepter.

The search input is treated as a regular expression, so if you
want to search for two words that may have other words between
them, use .*. For example, ox .* palm
will match ox horns with stripped palm branch.

Many of the hieroglyphs have also been associated with keywords
related to their use. If you select Include
usage, these keywords will also be selected. Note that this
keyword list is not exhaustive by any means, but it may
occasionally be useful. For example, a search for Anubis will
produce 𓁢 𓃢 𓃣 𓃤 .

(Note: to search for a character based on the Unicode name for
that character, eg. w004, use the search box in the
yellow area.)

Searching for pronunciations

Many of the hieroglyphs are associated with 1, 2 or 3 consonant
pronunciations. These can be looked up as follows.

Type the sequence of consonants into the output box and
highlight them. Then click on Look up from
Latin. Hieroglyphs that match that character or sequence of
characters will be displayed below the output box, and can be added
to the output box by clicking on them. (Note that if you still have
the search string highlighted in the output box those characters
will be replaced by the hieroglyph.)

You will find the panel Latin characters
useful for typing characters that are not accessible via your
keyboard. The panel is displayed by clicking on the higher
L in the grey bar to the left. Click on a
character to add it to the output area.

For example, if you want to obtain the hieroglyph 𓎝, which is
represented by the 3-character sequence wꜣḥ, add wꜣḥ to the output
area and select it. Then click on Latin
characters. You will see the character you need just above
the SPACE button. Click on that hieroglyph and it will replace the
wꜣḥ text in the output area. (Unhighlight the text in the output
area if you want to keep both and add the hierglyph at the cursor
position.)

Input panels accessed from the vertical grey bar

The vertical grey bar to the left allows you to turn on/off a
number of panels that can help create the text you want.

Latin characters. This panel
displays Latin characters you are likely to need for transcription.
It is particularly useful for setting up a search by pronunciation
(see above).

Latin to Egyptian. This panel also
displays Latin characters used for transcription, but when you
click on them they insert hieroglyphs into the output area. These
are 24 hieroglyphs represented by a single consonant. Think of it
as a shortcut if you want to find 1-consonant hieroglyphs by
pronunciation.

Where a single consonant can be represented by more than one
hieroglyph, a small pop-up will present you with the available
choices. Just click on the one you want.

Egyptian alphabet. This panel
displays the 26 hieroglyphs that the previous panel produces as
hieroglyphs. In many cases this is the quickest way of typing in
these hieroglyphs.

February 25, 2016

This Unicode character picker allows you to produce or analyse
runs of Egyptian Hieroglyph text using the Latin script.

Characters are grouped into standard categories. Click on one of
the orange characters, chosen as a nominal representative of the
class, to show below all the characters in that category. Click on
one of those to add it to the output box. As you mouse over the
orange characters, you’ll see the name of the category appear just
below the output box.

Just above the orange characters you can find buttons to insert
RLO and PDF controls. RLO will make the characters that follow it
to progress from right to left. Alternatively, you can select
more controls > Output
direction to set the direction of the output box to RTL/LTR
override. The latter approach will align the text to the right of
the box. I haven’t yet found a Unicode font that also flips the
glyphs horizontally as a result. I’m not entirely sure about the
best way to apply directionality to Egyptian hieroglyphs, so I’m
happy to hear suggestions.

Alongside the direction controls are some characters used for
markup in the Manuel de Codage, which allows you to prepare text
for an engine that knows how to lay it out two-dimensionally. (The
picker doesn’t do that.)

The Latin Characters panel, opened from the grey bar to the
left, provides characters needed for transcription.

In case you’re interested, here is the text you can see in the
picture. (You’ll need a font to see this, of course. Try the free
Noto Sans font, if
you don’t have one – or copy-paste these lines into the picker,
where you have a webfont.)
𓀀𓅃𓆣𓁿
<-i-mn:n-R4:t*p->
𓍹𓇋-𓏠:𓈖-𓊵:𓏏*𓊪𓍺

The last two lines spell the name of Amenhotep using Manuel de
Codage markup, according to the Unicode Standard (p 432).

February 14, 2016

Some of my international friends have asked what the recent
death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia means for
America, for our process, and for the election. I couldn’t fit it
into a tweet, so I thought I’d share my understanding and opinions
here. I don’t have any great insights or expertise, but I hope this
is useful for those who haven’t delved into the peculiarities of US
government and law.

The death of Justice Scalia leaves a seat open in the Supreme
Court of the United States (SCOTUS), the third branch of government
(the Judicial branch); the other two branches are Congress (the
Legislative branch, comprised of the House and Senate), and the
Presidency (the Executive branch).

The Supreme Court has 9 Justices, appointed for life. This means
that whomever is appointed as a replacement for Scalia will likely
affect the tone of American justice for decades after the President
who appointed them has left. Scalia was appointed in 1986, by
President Reagan, and has been a consistently conservative voice
for 30 years, frequently writing scathing and sarcastic dissenting
opinions (“minority reports”) for decisions he did not agree with,
including the legalization of same-sex marriage, Obamacare, women’s
rights to abortion, civil rights, and many other progressive
issues. Though he was intelligent, witty, and well-versed in the
law, he was not kind in his judgments.

When Scalia was alive, the Supreme Court was almost evenly split
between conservatives and progressives, with Chief Justice John
Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Antonin Scalia on the
strongly conservative side, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan,
Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor on the moderate to strongly
progressive side; the deciding vote has usually been the generally
fair-minded, moderately conservative Anthony Kennedy. The death of
Justice Scalia changes that balance. It’s expected that President
Obama would nominate a progressive as Scalia’s replacement, and
though he hasn’t yet named a candidate,
conservative politicians have already attempted to block Obama’s
appointment (in the true spirit of ♫whatever it is, I’m
against it♫ ), leaving it to the next President to decide.

It’s the duty and right of the sitting President to name
replacement nominees to the Supreme Court (and
Obama does intend to do so), and the
duty and right of the Senate (not all of Congress) to approve these
nominations. This has been highly politicized in the past few
years, with more and more attempts by both conservatives and (to a
lesser extent) progressives to block Supreme Court appointments,
drawing out the debate, so there’s some wisdom in nominating a
moderate Justice, in hopes of a speedy and non-contentious approval
by the Senate. Notably, the nominee doesn’t have to be a current
judge, or even a lawyer, but in reality, the Senate would be
unlikely to approve anyone who isn’t a law professional (with good
reason).

The nominee must get a simple majority in the Senate; currently,
with 2 Senators from each of the 50 States, that means 51 approval
votes.

The Republicans control the Senate, with 54 senators; the
Democrats have only 44 senators; Independents make up the balance,
with 2 senators (Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of
Maine), who typically vote with the Democrats. While there are a
few conservative Democratic senators, it’s likely that all
Democratic and Independent senators will vote to appoint Obama’s
nominee, whomever that might be. That’s only 46 votes, meaning at
least 4 Republican senators will need to cross party lines to vote
for the appointee… in an election year. That could be a tough sell
for Obama.

If you did the math, you’ll have noticed that 46 + 4 = 50, not
51; luckily, if there’s a split vote in the Senate, the Vice
President casts the deciding vote, and Joe Biden is closely aligned
with President Obama.

If Obama can’t get the votes he needs for his nominee (a real
possibility), he could wait until Congress adjourns for the year,
and make a recess appointment, meaning a judicial
selection while Congress is not in session; but this appointment
would be temporary, less than 2 years, and the next President would
certainly be the one to make the permanent appointment.

I’m reasonably confident (though not certain) that the next
Supreme Court Justice will be a progressive, and will be appointed
by President Obama, not the next President. But that wouldn’t mean
that the implications of this for the 2016 Presidential election
are any less notable! Other Justices (including the beloved
Notorious RBG and “Swing Vote” Kennedy) may step down
or even die during the term of the next President, meaning that
the balance might shift yet again. We can’t ignore the fact that
Bernie Sanders, a sitting Independent senator, will have a vote in
the current Supreme Court nomination, while Hillary won’t, which
will likely raise Bernie’s profile (for good or ill). And while the
nomination process is underway, all the candidates will talk about
who they’d appoint to the Supreme Court (keeping in mind that
Obama
probably doesn’t want the job), though I dearly hope they don’t
get the chance. Finally, there’s the tiny chance that in a close
race, the Supreme Court may decide who the next President is…

The Impact of the Supreme Court

It’s easy to underestimate the power the Supreme Court has on
America’s domestic policy, and on people’s lives. What is legal or
not is often (perhaps usually) decided not by Congress (the
Legislative branch, which drafts, proposes, and votes on new
federal laws) or the President (the Executive branch, which
approves, implements, enforces, and administers those federal
laws), but by the Supreme Court (the Judicial branch, which decides
if federal laws adhere to the Constitution, and which acts as the
final say on the application of federal laws, and on how state laws
are affected by federal laws and the Constitution).

Some landmark policies that the average person associates
generally with the US government were specifically decided by the
Supreme Court:

the legality of a woman’s right to abortion (in the famous
court case Roe v Wade)

whether states had the right to keep their schools segregated
between black students and white students (and much earlier,
whether African American slaves were entitled to
citizenship)

whether same-sex couples can get married (and earlier, whether
interracial couples could get married)

whether there is any limit on how much money a corporation or
union can spend in elections (under the aegis of free speech)

the legality of some aspects of Obamacare (aka the Affordable
Care Act), which determined if the law as a whole could be
implemented

whether Florida could recount the ballots in the contested 2000
election between George Bush and Al Gore (though this is a rare
instance… that usually doesn’t happen)

Some of these are issues that could have specific federal laws
about them, but which Congress did not address. For example,
Congress has never made a federal law that makes same-sex marriage
legal, and it probably would have been decades before that would
ever have happened, if it ever did (politicians typically play it
safe, because they have to try to get re-elected); but based on the
Supreme Court’s hearing of lower (state and district) courts’
rulings on state laws to determine if state laws were legal through
the lens of the federal Constitution, and on the Supreme Court’s
decision around some federal laws, it became legal for same-sex
couples to get married. Congress could still make a law on this,
one way or another, to settle details or try to overturn the
Supreme Court’s decision (for example, by changing the Constitution
itself), but for the foreseeable future, the Supreme court made
same-sex marriage legal in every state of the Union, and has all
the federal benefits of marriage.

The Supreme Court decides which cases it will try. On average,
SCOTUS tries 60-75 oral arguments (what we think of as a
court case) per year, and reviews another 50-60 more cases on
paper.

Every year, tens of millions of civil and criminal court cases
are tried in US state courts; hundreds of thousands of those
decisions are appealed to a higher state court; tens of thousands
of those are appealed to a federal district court, if the matter is
applicable to federal law rather than state law, and district
courts are further organized into 11 federal circuits; thousands of
these cases are appealed to the Supreme Court, of which they accept
a mere 1–2%. In addition, there are court cases of major federal or
interstate crimes, and cases of disputes between state governments
or between a state government and the federal government, or
maritime laws where no state has jurisdiction, or cases of
bankruptcy or ambassadorial issues.

So, the chance that the Supreme Court will hear any particular
case is very slim, and is typically only the most important cases,
but when they do rule on a case, it sets the precedent for the rest
of the country, at a state and federal level, and is rarely
overturned.

Scalia’s Legacy

While it’s not polite to speak ill of the dead, and while I can
mourn Scalia’s death as a person, I’ve long held a very low opinion
of him, and I admit that I’m glad of any opportunity to shift the
character of the Supreme Court to a more progressive,
compassionate, and modern constituency.

Many have painted Scalia as a patriot who’s made America better;
here’s my dissenting opinion.

Scalia was clever, and I think it’s even more important for
clever people to also strive to be good people; even more so if
they are in a position of power. He may have been a good person to
his friends and family, but he did not carry that over into how he
served this country.

His writings struck me as insincere, and his claim to adhere to
“Constitutional originalism” was belied by his whimsical
interpretations of the US Constitution, such as his very modern
stance that the 2nd Amendment ensured private ownership of guns,
rather than the original emphasis on militias for national defense,
and the absurd notion that
“The Constitution is not a living document”, when the
Constitution itself defines how to amend it.

And while he’s perhaps most famous for his dissenting opinions,
it’s his majority rulings that have caused the most damage to
America and Americans. And even beyond that, he’s used his Judicial
authority to step into decisions on lower courts. For example, in
2000’s Presidential election, it was Scalia who personally
intervened in the Florida court decision to halt the recount, and
later the Supreme Court ruled not to let the votes be recounted,
handing the election to George W. Bush.

Beyond his own rulings, his influence and legacy is in giving
voice, authority, and credibility to a radical conservatism that
influenced a generation of legal thought, carried on in Alito and
Roberts, which holds that interpreting the text of the law is more
important than the applicability to modern society and technology.
In other words, it claims that trying to imagine (in a ridiculous
fantasy) the opinions of a person living over two centuries ago,
when this country was yet unformed, is more relevant than a view
informed by the country as it has since developed. Generously, this
is truly “conservative”, preserving the prejudices and ignorance of
bygone eras along with any wisdom; more pointedly, this was a
convenient way to appear impartial while twisting the result to his
own backwards ideological view.

Scalia’s rulings were often specious and inhumane, mere clever
arguments based on selective interpretation of the wording of laws
and the Constitution rather than attempts at applying justice. In
dissenting on a ruling for reopening a death-penalty case, where
most of the original witnesses had recanted their testimonies,
Scalia said, “Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out
a death sentence properly reached.” For Scalia, it seems, the law
was not a way to achieve social or personal fairness, but a
pro-forma game whose rules were both strict and meaningless.

It’s hard to imagine someone as retrograde as Scalia getting
nominated or confirmed, so I’m hopeful that we’ll have a more
reasonable, just, and progressive Supreme Court in the next few
months. This is how the Founding Fathers wanted this country to
work… with each generation forging its own vision of a more perfect
union, renewing the government to meet their own needs and desires,
with the consistent thread of life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. And, in the end, justice.